Saturday, June 25, 2016

The voluntary participation of all three centers, part II

Cormorant

Sparkill, NY

I pass this information about sensation on because I see that the permanent sensation, the organic sensation of Being, is so often misunderstood.

One can go a very long way into the ideas and preparatory work and get completely lost if one does not keep one's attention firmly placed on this question. Many groups, many group leaders, and many well-meaning individuals with a very sophisticated understanding of the Gurdjieff work manage to go far without awakening the organic sensation of Being. Sometimes they even awaken the other parts which are not foundational and can produce interesting results; but Gurdjieff himself warned about the futility of such work in Chapter 9 of In Search of the Miraculous, and his reservations about such work stand to this day as legitimate ones.

The whole point of the Gurdjieff process, if it's properly understood in an organic way, is that it is a whole thing, a sphere that contains all the necessary elements of work in it. My recent essays about the meaning of the "coating' of the higher being bodies shows, in a small sketch, the wholeness of the process and the way in which every part correctly contacts with every other part. One can't take just one part of it and presume one has done enough; all the parts must be brought together within a person and they must understand the connections between them. This means that a very active thinking part must participate, that is, one must exercise the intelligence and help it develop agility.

Unfortunately, once again, many branches of work have arisen where individuals prefer shamanistic approaches in which they loftily (and repetitively) claim nothing can be explained, there are no words, no one should try to answer anything, and so on, blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately this kind of psychobabble, which is often originally inspired by legitimate blissful experiences, has become all too common, and folk imitate one another in it. These are not just examples of laziness in the intellect — although they are quite definitely just that — they are also dangerous ideas that prevent individuals from a healthy development of intellectual center, which needs to be challenged to develop in new and more critical ways, not invited to fall ever more soundly asleep in the delusional belief that nothing can be understood on our level.

To that point. I had an argument with a friend of advanced understanding recently in which they invoked much higher ideas, cosmologically "top level" ideas, about how there is no good or evil. While this idea is essentially true, it is true at a level that retains no significance for those of us at our level. Where we are, there is good and evil; and while it's equally true that at a certain level, nothing can be understood, this does not excuse us from making the effort to understand at the level we are on.

Not in the least.

A devotion to nothingness will lead to nothing. We have a habit of arrogating philosophies at levels well beyond ourselves and slapping them on to our understanding like Band-Aids. Don't do this.

Everything takes place within an ordered hierarchy in our cosmos, and the development of Being must be built on an intelligent, material, and compassionate foundation constructed of balanced elements of all three materials. This is the same thing as saying that hydrogens 48, 24, and 12 need to participate; and for each of these three faculties, or centers, they have their own hydrogens 48, 24, and 12 that build them.

If one doesn't lay down the corresponding structural substances that allow one to receive the next level of substance, no matter what direction the structure is erected in, eventually it becomes top-heavy or unbalanced in one area or another and is subject to toppling.

Gurdjieff's admonitions to Ouspensky about the ways which accidentally (or otherwise) ignore these principles still stand. In our own case, the structural necessity is acquired first through sensation. Everything else comes later.

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Recommendations and current reading list

Lee's current reading list (all recommended)

The Iceberg- Marion Coutts. This extraordinary book deserves to be read by every individual engaged in an inner search. The questions it raises about life, death, and relationship are framed by the authors responsibilities to her very young child and her dying husband. This is a book about real work in life, not esoteric theory.

Far From The Tree: Andrew Solomon. Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Highly recommended.

Inner Yoga, Sri Anirvan—This extraordinary book is essential reading for any serious student of Gurdjieff or Yoga practice. Written at a level of both practical and philosophical discourse well above other contemporary work, Anirvan investigates the deep roots of Yoga practice, theory, and philosophy in a deeply sensitive series of insights. Of particular interest is the extraordinary and challenging piece on Buddhi and Buddhiyoga, which examines the questions of practice, life, and death with an acuity rarely encountered in other work of this nature.

Divine Love and Wisdom, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg gives us a detailed report on Reality as received from higher sources, reflecting many Truths one would be wise to study carefully. Readers will be astounded by the extraordinary degree of correlation between Swedenborg and Ibn 'Arabi. Many fundamental principles introduced by Gurdjieff are also expounded on in fascinating detail by Swedenborg. All of Swedenborg's works are well worth reading.

The Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, Ibn 'Arabi. Another real gem, this book ought to be read by every seeker on the spiritual path. If you can only find the time to read one book by Ibn 'Arabi, this ought to be the one. By turns lighthearted, serious, insightful, and ingenius, al 'Arabi introduces us to our inner government character by character, explains their relationships, and indicates how to bring them into a state of harmonious cooperation. Written with love, the book deftly manages to avoid being didactic, delivering instead a sensitive, poetic, and even romantic look at how to organize our inner Being.

The Bezels of Wisdom—Ibn al 'Arabi. A compendium of observations about the nature of "The Reality"—what al 'Arabi calls God— from a 13th century Sufi master. This towering work easily holds its own against—and is worthy of comparison to—13th century masterpieces from other major religious traditions such as Dogen's Shobogenzo and Meister Eckhart's sermons.